"Yeah," I said. "All clear out front?"
"Yeah. Let's check out back." There was a small building behind the larger warehouse that Leland was now covering. There was only one door and no windows, so no way for anyone to escape. But we needed to go in carefully in case someone was waiting inside.
Ten minutes later, we had the door open and had moved inside the small structure. It looked to be deserted.
Josh flicked a light switch on the wall and Leland and I sucked in a breath. Noah swore, "Holy shit," and Eli muttered, "Mother f**ker."
At the back of the room, was the biggest stash of weapons I had come upon, Russian made surface to air missiles and rocket propelled grenades. It was a f**king stockpile.
"Jesus, that f**ker had some serious plans," Josh said.
We all stilled as we heard a small scraping sound in the back. When I examined the back wall, I noticed a small door next to the shelves of weaponry. It almost blended into the wall.
I nodded to the other men, making sure they saw it too, and we moved in.
Noah kicked the door in this time and as Josh shined his flashlight into the pitch-black space, we all recoiled at the smell. "God damn!" Josh coughed.
The sight that met our eyes was straight out of a horror movie.
**********
"You okay, man?" Noah asked quietly. I brought my head up from out of my arms, resting on my knees and looked up at him. "Figure I will be. You?"
His chin went up in a jerky nod. "About the same."
I nodded back, watching the other four men walk up the rocky slope toward us. "The other team will be here in about twenty minutes," Eli said.
When we had called in the night before, we had been ordered to stay with the weaponry until another team could get there to inventory it. The morning sun was already fully up in the sky.
Noah and I nodded, Noah speaking quietly, holding up his radio, "We're supposed to be at our rendezvous point in six hours."
"We'll be ready to leave as soon as the other team gets here then," Leland said, emotionless, a faraway look in his eyes that I didn't like. Even Josh was somber, patting Leland on his back as he walked by him.
Half an hour later, we had briefed the second team and were ready to leave. I stood up, hefting up my gear and securing it to my back as the other men did the same. We started walking. I only looked back once.
**********
It had taken us longer than we thought it would to jog the distance to our rendezvous point, and we were still about an hour away when the sun started to set in the desert sky. It was the end of October when night temperatures dropped rapidly in Afghanistan. Our breath came out in short white bursts as we hiked quietly, all of us aware of our surroundings, as we were trained to be, but quiet in our own thoughts.
Suddenly, Josh, who was walking in the lead, stopped and held up his hand to indicate we stop as well. We all came to a halt, listening. When none of us heard anything, we moved forward again. A few hundred feet later, Josh halted again and we all halted as well, readying our weapons. We were trained well enough to know that one hunch based on the snapping of a stick in the desert might be dismissed, but two most definitely shouldn't be. We all moved so that our backs were to each other and circled slowly, squinting our eyes to see as far as possible in the darkening distance.
"Shit!" Leland grunted as one shot rang out and his leg buckled and he went down next to me.
The rest was a blur of gunfire, blood, explosions, and pain. So much f**king pain.
I heard someone moaning from faraway and for just a second, I was lucid, the noise exploding back into my brain as I came to and lifted my head from the ground, where somehow I had ended up.
Leland was next to me and I could see that his leg was in bad shape, part of the bone broken and protruding almost straight out of the skin. He was moaning and trying to drag himself toward me.
I went to push myself off the ground and bit my lip to stop myself from screaming out in agony, my hands were covered in blood and blisters, the skin hanging loose in several areas. A surge of adrenalin pulsed through me and I sprung to my feet and hefted Leland under his arms, bearing his weight on my forearms as I dragged him away from the gunfire that was still hitting rocks to the left of us, where I could also hear Eli, Josh and Noah yelling and returning fire. There was too much smoke for me to see what was going on. My job now was to get Leland out of the line of fire. As I moved away, I tripped on something, my body jerking strangely. I struggled to stay upright with Leland's weight in my arms and after a second, kept moving.
Leland grunted in pain as I dragged him with me, my own grunts of exertion mingling with his. I looked behind me and saw a rock big enough that I thought we could both fit behind it, and picked up speed. I rounded the rock a couple seconds later and lay Leland down and collapsed to the right of him, just as a spray of bullets took out a piece of the top of the rock, small pebbles raining down on us as we covered our heads.
Leland looked at me, pale and expressionless and passed out again. I saw more blood coming through his jacket and moved it open with my forearms. Thank God it was unzipped. "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" I grunted out. He had been shot in the chest too, and the blood was slowly spreading, soaking his shirt underneath. I glanced back down to my mangled hands, so swollen now, they were entirely useless. I leaned over him, putting pressure on the bullet wound with my arms, closing my eyes and picturing the only thing that brought me true calm–the sunrise. In my mind, I pictured it coming up slowly over the horizon, bathing the world around it in light, in hope.